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My first banjo was bought online in 2008. About a year later, I wanted something different. My mistake was buying an instrument sight unseen, or rather sound unheard.

There have been times during my search for a fiddle that I've come close to buying some cheapo from some so-called "reputable" website, but my experience buying that Recording King taught me better. Not that the banjo was bad. It just didn't have the sound I was searching for, mainly because I didn't really know what that sound was.

Now, having played old-time music for a few years and hearing other fiddlers, I'm already leagues ahead of that first instrument purchase because I have an idea of what I want my first fiddle to sound like. While I have no clue how to play anything on the fiddle, I've been lucky to have someone on hand to play the instruments I've been considering in a way I hope to one day be able to play.

My first stop was Studio Strings in Wadsworth, Ohio, where the propri…

Banjo Glory

When you want genuine music -- music that will come right home to you like a bad quarter, suffuse your system like strychnine whisky, go right through you like Brandreth's pills, ramify your whole constitution like the measles, and break out on your hide like the pin-feather pimples on a picked goose, -- when you want all this, just smash your piano, and invoke the glory-beaming banjo!--Mark Twain, "Enthusiastic Eloquence," San Francisco Dramatic Chronicle, June 23, 1865